Blog

for those that still visit here, everything will be getting pulled over the next few days/weeks whilst i got for a full rebuild.

Site maybe down for quite some time.

I have been experiencing issues was my car’s wiring of late, causing a random losses of power, this was found to be an issue with the engine and harness, I sourced a new wiring harness from wreckers unfortunately when fitting is harness I found that there was a different configuration after returning it to the wreckers Jason was nice enough to give me a $75.00 credit it attempted to obtain a manual wiring harness over the next two weeks however was unsuccessful on Thursday I picked up another auto wiring harness in an attempt to convert it to Manual harness however today after probing all the wires in both harnesses I found that the almost none of the wires match and will all need to be rewired
I’ll be posting out details of the modification shortly however I do need to test it on my vehicle before i blow up anyone elses
Last weekend I changed the oil, the spark plugs, the leads and cleaned up the DFI module hopefully with the new harness this will return my car to its former Glory

i also tried out the voice regonition features of vista writing this post. not too bad. needs some training tho

It looks like I’ve lost the second of my two Blaupunkt overdrive 10 inch subs, maybe time to see if i can get my hands on some Velocity Gold 15’s again or a Burning Desire II, unfortunatly I was stpuid enough to pass up the opertunity to get one for 1500 bucks when i was working at Expert.

Im also in the process of organising all my debts, when i fell behind from the car accedent has finaly caught up with me.

Well I decided to spoil sez for her 21st this year (like she has a 21st every year..) any way we had just recently cleaned out the garage, During this massive cleanup I came up with the best idea, Sarah has a nice RED SV5000 kit sitting around that she always wanted to put on her new VN, I knew painting a body kit was not something to undertake lightly, So i spent a week researching painting methods and preperation steps.

Trying to keep this from sarah was actually quite difficult (especialy seeing I cant organise my way out of a paper bag) But i managed to organise a Spray Gun, compressor someones place to spray it and even get it there without her noticing. Thee hardest part was trying to get a paint sample, Simple, take the fuel cap! But when Sez wont even let me near the car let alone the keys I had to credit card the damn thing off, unfortunatly every time I got the fuel cap open Sarah would turn up trying to figure out what I was doing (I’m sure at one stage she thought I was trying to steal petrol from her) Anyway I managed to get Paint and supplies without Sarah knowing (even tho she comes with me everywhere) Unfortunatly the place I had organised to spary the Kit was no-longer available, so I decided to show sez the Paint and supplies as a B/day gift incase the Kit wasnt ready (at this stage im still pushing it), after a lot of “appreication” we organised a trailer and took the kit to my Uncle’s.

After grinding up the insides of the damaged parts with a angle grinder we set to patching the fiber glass, fiber filling the large holes and Bogging up the large scratches (And using ACID to remove the CEMENT!) we sanded everything down and went to bed. in the morning David threw on a coat of primer, We saw a scary sight, there was so many small nicks, chips and scratches all over the kit, after a quick trip down to Supercheap (unfortunatly milsomes was closed) to grab some Spray Putty (read: “Trytocoveritallputty”) and throwing on a decently thick coat of that we managed to fill all the smaller nics etc etc. I spent a decnt hour (or maybe two) sanding a side skirt to perfection, only to find I had used sandpaper too fine (the kit was smoooooth as) one of the locals (read: my auntie) ran down the street to grab some corser paper.. another complete sand,, sand and more sanding we sprayed the kit in putty again to get any of the nics we missed.

So as of this moment we have a Bright BLUE bodykit hanging on some wires. and  two very very tired lovers.

Must go being called to bed.

whoohoo the tassie miners are safe… and they made it onto wikipedia

check out the details here

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaconsfield_mine_collapse

Who needs journalists?

yep.. lame name just came up with it

anyway heres a screen shot of the concept app

ive had it moving a zippo ligher bottle attached to a floppy drive for 24 hours.. not a single hicup.

now to make hardware and test my algorithim

so far ir works by trying to match the vent output to the desired temp

if its to hot outside it will turn on the ac

if the vent temp is to low verses the cabin temp it floors the fan and maxes the heater

there is some pretty hefty tollerence before that happens of course

im sure when i can be bothered.. ill code some sort of module support in (ugh) so i can just write modules to suit diffrent setups.

but for the mean time i need to get round to making a setup to control the airflow lever.

Im also thinking of using steppers from a printer as they have a bit more punch than the floppies (mind you.. im amazed at how strong they are!)

umm okay.. ill admit.. I got the old theme for WP installed a while ago.. and I never realy even thought about testing it in IE. (I remember the days of designing in IE and testing in netscape 4) so to any of you who were experencing the “text goes waaaaay over to the right” thing… either.. install firefox. or get off my internet.. umm no thats not what i ment.. err sorry

but seriously if your not using firefox.. give it a shot.. tabbed browsing.. and none of these nasty “drive by downloads”(read ad/spyware) that constantly get exploited in IE

yep.. i havent had any sleep.. just wait till i crash.

so using some information off this page.. ive manged to implement a stepper motor function using a floppy drive and my usb controler circut i made a few months back (info here)

now what id like to do is try and find an old 5 1/4 inch drive and i just dont think the 3 1/2 has enough length.. altough with 84 steps to play with.. i think we will be fine.

i could ofcourse probably write a plugin interface to suit different control methods too.. like LPT.. other Vellman cards or maybe even using the FDD port on the motherboard.(that could get messy during system boot if your heater flaps are heavy.. turn off floppy seek!)
this option is just such a cheap and simple way of getting a steppermotor with a controler circut.

atm i can support upto 255 steps using this method without recoding… but it is interesting when i forget to set the MAX limit slider

the only problem i can see at the moment is there is no feedback from the stepper at all.. if it skips a step because the work load is to hard the flap its controling would be slightly in the wrong position.. but the fact we only have a step accuracy of 17 steps in the app (17 degrees 17 steps) makes that irelevant anyway because one step on the motor doesnt even come close to causing a problem. (a few might).. a simple solution to this is to close the app and open it again.. it will execute the maximum number of return steps possible to get the motor back. (unless you specify not to.. my floppy drive automaticly stops steping when its home and just ignores the commands,, even at the other end where it doesnt stop.. it just slips inside the fork)

its also amazing to see these motors can handle so much LOAD.. i honestly thought it wouldnt move a hair.. but it quite happily shuffled my bottle of zippo lighter back and forth..

so ill be looking more into this.. an extremely cheap way to move leavers inside your car.. ill leave the mechanics of that upto you guys..

ohh and heres a video of the software moving the drive..(i know you cant hear wat im saying.. basicly i set it to MAX temprature.. then MIN.. then turn on climate control and tell it to hold 20 degrees with a varying outside temprature) note this is using a usb interface card connected to 2 open collector outputs (green thing behind it)… all you need to be able to do is send earth signals to two wires, and you can send them as slow as you like… but your heater might take longer to move. you can do it with an lpt easy.. i just needa code it (in vb… i dunno never done that)

whoohoo.

Pumped out a proof of concept on my climate control app.. atm it only moves a slider and has realy flaky temprature emulation.. but it proves my algorithim works… kinda

so far in 4 hours ive manged to implemtent

Variable motor end points
(lets be honest. how many peeps are going to make the servo move the whole way for max min on the heater knob? i know im not going to.. i dont have enough throw)

This is ofcourse assuming i can get the stepper motor “Home” when the vehicle starts..(why do i imagine crunchy noises.. maybe a sensor?) then we have a set playing field

variable tollerance for “extreme” climate change.. ie.. if the cabin temprature is (variable temprature) from the heater output (like when the car starts). override the standard algorithim and take drastic measures (turn up/down the heat in a bigger quantity)

I dont have a fan control yet.. thats going to be fun to write..

Automatic control of the AC.. if its hotter outside than what we want.. it turns on..
it will also turn on if the drastic measures statement comes true (its hotter in here than we want.. by alot)

atm its only in single degrees and the stepper motor only has 17 possible heat positions (why? it made temprature emulation easyer to code) but i doubt in a real world enviroment we will benefit from any more than 17 positions.

You can grab a copy here or if you need the visual basic runtimes (you get an error trying to run the app) grab this file, you will need a rar application like winrar to open the above files.
these files have been scanned for virii before they leave my computer so they should be fine, im not responsible for what you do with this app or what it will do to your computer.. this is a proof of concept i wrote realy quickly.. but i doubt anything will go wrong… theres nothing in there to go wrong

okay.. for those that know me ive been dreaming this up for years.. now Ive got the hardware.. im embarking on this project… all i need is money.. thankfully time will no longer be an issue regardless of what job I get.. the main problem was with expert I would work a reasonably sized day.. come home and the last thing i wanted to do was work on the car..

So ive already got everything i need right now to make a basic carputer in the car.. hell i could even throw an xbox in there to get the functionaly MOST peeps want… but as always im setting myself a challange thats too far for most peeps… hence why it will take longer than most projects.

My car is my never ending project.. some peeps have trains.. some collect cars… mine is my car and getting it nice and in the process attempting to be at least a little bit unique.

last time i looked at doing this.. my software of choice was Media Engine.. mostly because its open source and in VB.. bonus. sadly last time the source code that was available on the website was majorly behind the binaries

Unfortunatly i havent realy found a single application that suits my needs.. I just had a quick look at StreetDeck and thought it was a bit bloaty and I didnt like the fact it was centered around WMP10.. its not that i dislike microsoft products.. I just like less bloat where possible.. media engine was good in the fact that it used winamp for most of its work… but winamp still fails to render h264 and vobsubs correctly….. sure im not going to watch anime whilst driving or anything but im pretty sure a project like this will stay in the car for quite some time so who knows.. maybe the kids (HA!) will watch stuff on it.

I’ve been considering writing my own universal “Comb Over” app to do cool things as heater contols etc..

by comb over i mean a seperate application that uses an overlay similar to objectdock or the MS office bar and stays in one corner of the screen.. when you touch this corner (or mouseover for trackball installs) my app slides(fades maybe?) in and shows the heater controls.

obviosuly i would have to try and make it as universal as possible to begin with.. ALA was a perfect example of something I coded for myself that almost needed a complete rewrite save for the file i/o structure to make it public domain, and even then i still didnt give out the source code.

some sort of callable DLL or somthing to support diffrent usb relay interfaces and the like and girder support..(because we all know girder pwns when used correctly)

as for analog heater controls i guess i could work it around a stepper motor control

mmm..

time for some very very basic coding to prove my theroy

damn i havent touched vb in years.. this is going to hurt.